Boots on the ground–minus keyboards.
A group of white nationalists will protest the new Robert Rodriguez movie Machete — which depicts a Mexican renegade attempting to assassinate an anti-immigrant senator played by Robert DeNiro — at Bay Area cinemas this week. This gets even more interesting: The protesters will show up “armed” with machetes. Jessica Alba and Lindsay Lohan, beware.
Frequent readers of this site may recall the Bay Area National Anarchists — BANA for short — the white nationalist group that showed up at the May Day immigration reform rally at Civic Center Plaza to instead show support of the Arizona “papers please” SB 1070 immigration law. BANA founder Andrew Yeoman and two other members were allegedly beaten while leaving the rally by black bloc anarchists, two of whom are now charged with misdemeanor assault.BANA is also known for showing up to protest the Folsom Street Fair. But they will be doing a warmup act from Friday to Sunday at movie theaters showing the slasher film in the city, North Bay and East Bay, Yeoman says, “along with like-minded individuals and grassroots organizations nationwide.” He even started a Facebook page to promote the protest.
“We feel that this is an explicit threat to white folks,” Yeoman wrote on the far-right blog Occidental Dissent, “and that it is necessary to send a message to moviegoers and the producers of this film that threatening people because they happen to be white is unacceptable.”
In a press release, Yeoman writes the people of Arizona “valiantly stood up for Western Culture and state sovereignty vis-a-vis a recent law that prescribed penalties for those who aid in the invasion of our country.”
As for the machetes, San Francisco Police spokeswoman Lieutenant Lyn Tomioka says there’s nothing inherently illegal with openly carrying around a machete, as long as protesters aren’t using them in a menacing manner. “If they’re threatening people who want to go in and watch this movie, then that could be an issue. That would generate calls for police service.”
Yeoman says “we feel that bringing machetes is important symbolism,” adding in the press release that the members will come “armed with flyers as well.”
This should be interesting. We’ll report back.